A Gift
by chocolatebearturk
Summary: Sarah receives a gift on her birthday.


This is a fic for JDPhoenix, a friend I truly don't deserve. Thank you so much for being the wonderful person you are, and I hope you enjoy this poor excuse for a fic that I wrote for your birthday.

* * *

The year she turns twelve is the first year she celebrates her birthday without her mother. Dad tries to make it special, as though he's trying to prove that they can still have fun and be a family without Mom. He makes her favorite dinner and takes her to the movies and only takes a call from the office once during the whole day.

Just the two of them at the dinner table is quiet, though, and he burned the chicken and the roasted potatoes, and they missed the first ten minutes of the movie because Dad was looking at the wrong showtimes. The cake is store-bought and Dad can't sing for her the way Mom did and when Sarah goes to bed that night, she sobs as quietly as she can with her head buried under the quilt her mother had picked out for her when she turned nine.

Her tears quiet and slow when she slides her hand under her pillow and finds something hard and flat. She pulls it out to look at it and the moon is bright enough to read the cover by.

"The Labyrinth," she breathes, running a finger over the gold lettering. Was it a gift Dad had left for her as a surprise?

She dries her eyes on her pajama sleeve and opens the cover to read.

* * *

The year she turns thirteen is the first time her mother has taken the time to visit since her and Dad's divorce. She lives in London now, and explains several times through the whole day that she would have loved to take Sarah home with her for a visit, that she would have obviously come sooner, if she'd just had the money to make it happen. Her apartment in the city is too small for visitors and she just can't afford tickets in and out of the country on a whim.

Sarah watches the baubles on her hands and around her throat glitter and click against one another as she laments her situation and doesn't say a word. She's afraid if she does, her mother will take off again like a startled bird and it will be more than just a year and a half until she sees her.

Instead she drinks in her mother's presence, laughs a little too loudly at the antics of her agent, and studies the tiny lines on the outer edges of her mother's green, green eyes. Her hair is done in a style too young for a woman with a thirteen-year-old daughter, and her top is cut low enough that their server at lunch has a hard time concentrating on writing down Sarah's order. Still, she just repeats herself for the third time and sniggers into her hand when the boy leaves to take their orders to the kitchen.

"Guess I've still got it," her mother says with a saucy wink. Sarah will spend hours trying to replicate that gesture in her bedroom mirror later, but for now she just leans her head on her hand and smiles.

Linda Williams drops her daughter off at home wearing a brand-new cashmere cardigan and holding a slip of paper with her London phone number on it. She can't stay, but she will call. Sarah bites back her tears and wishes her luck on her next audition.

When she gets inside she races up to her bedroom and slams the door behind her and wills herself to breathe, breathe, breathe, because if she starts crying she won't stop and Dad wanted to take her out to dinner later and she can't go if her eyes are too puffy to see out of.

She throws herself down on her bed and takes deep, gulping breaths. _The Labyrinth_ is a brick under her stomach and she focuses on it, sliding her hands down to grasp it and hold it close like one of her soft toys. Dad said he didn't know where the book came from when she asked about it, and she's decided she doesn't care. All that matters is that she has it.

Right now it feels like the only thing in the world that's _real_.

There's a woman sitting at Mom's place at the dinner table when she finally comes downstairs later, looking refreshed and not at all like she spent most of the afternoon trying not to burst into messy tears.

Dad introduces her quickly, smiling too brightly and laying a hand on each of their shoulders. This is Irene, he tells Sarah. She works at my law firm, he tells Sarah. I asked her if she'd like to help me celebrate your birthday, he tells Sarah, since it was so lonely last year.

Sarah meets the woman's eyes and can see in that first instant exactly what's going on. She wants to scream, or run, or both. She wants to lock herself in her room and crawl under her bed and clutch that book to her chest and wish beyond wishing that the goblins would come and take her away _right now_.

Instead she smiles and says, "I'm Sarah. It's nice to meet you."

* * *

When Sarah turns fourteen, she absolutely despises Irene. Dad has gone to extreme efforts to make it clear that Irene has done all the work behind making her birthday plans; that she suggested they go to Sarah's favorite restaurant, that she baked Sarah's cake, that she picked out the best present of all her birthday gifts. She knows that Dad just wants her to like his new wife (her new mother) but it honestly just makes it sound like he didn't make any decisions at all.

It's made all the worse by the fact that Mom can't make it out to be with her again—she's on a movie shoot right now, darling, and she would break away if she could but the director would absolutely have her head!—and she's left to deal with this pale imitation who smiles even when she's being a brat and laughs off every insult and slight like it's just no big deal.

The restaurant is lovely, though Sarah pretends she isn't in the mood for Italian and hems and haws over the menu before she goes with her usual favorite. Irene doesn't say a word about her rudeness, although her lips do thin a little the second time Sarah asks the waiter for just another minute to decide. The cake is good and moist, though Sarah pointedly drinks two glasses of milk with her slice and stares at Irene over the rim.

When Sarah opens the collection of storybooks, bound in white with shimmering gold accents and beautiful illustrations, she can't bring herself to say something rotten and instead feels rotten herself for how she's been acting. She clears her throat and scratches at her burning nose.

"Thank you, Irene," she says quietly. Her voice is just a tad bit hoarse. "These are beautiful."

Irene looks at her as though she's hung the moon, beaming so brightly that Sarah feels even worse than ever. She lifts herself with a small sound of effort, placing a hand protectively over her rounded stomach, and crosses around to Sarah's side of the table to cover her hand. It's so light, without the weight of even a single ring, and her nails are plain and clean instead of some lurid, provocative color. In that moment Sarah can't fault her the differences.

"It means so much to me that you like them," Irene says. Her smile gentles down into something fond and faraway. Her hand strokes absently over her belly again. "I enjoyed them when I was your age; I'm glad they'll get some use again."

Sarah's throat clicks when she swallows.

When she goes up to her room later that night, however, she doesn't sit down on her bed with one of the beautiful white storybooks. She leaves them on their new spot on her bookshelf and instead pulls out a little red book from under her pillow. She lays on her back and stares at the ceiling and doesn't even need to open the cover to begin to recite the tale.

"Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a beautiful young woman who was fair of face and soft of voice, but so, so terribly naïve. When she was but a girl, her mother went away and her father remarried, and soon the new couple had a son. The young woman resented him, and the fact that she had to spend most of her time watching the babe while her family worked…"

She doesn't tell anyone—honestly, she doesn't have anyone to tell—but it feels like a prophecy.

* * *

Sarah's fifteenth birthday is nothing to write home about. Her mother stays in London, citing that her Christmas visit took a real chunk out of her useable finances, and promises that she'll send off a present as soon as she can. Irene bakes her another cake and her dad promises to take her to the movies when he gets home from work, but he's held up at the office so late that they miss even the last showing at the theatre. Toby, whose first birthday is mere weeks after hers, delights in the ribbon she sticks impishly to his forehead

Later that night, when he won't stop crying and she remembers doting on him, playing with him, smiling at his laughter, she wonders if there's something wrong with her. She wonders if it's normal to hate someone so small and innocent. She wonders if it makes her a horrible person to resent him for having a mother who so clearly loves him. She wonders what it means that she's so jealous of an infant.

 _The Labyrinth_ is hard and real under her fingers and as it always is on her birthday, the moon is bright enough to read by. The gold lettering on the front glitters as she traces it and she opens it to the first page without thinking. The first paragraph claws at her, and her throat stops up with something bitter and resentful and terribly, terribly painful. She turns her head away so she won't get tears on the page.

"Prophecy indeed," she mutters to herself, the words coming out raw from her tight and aching throat. She closes the book and clutches it to her chest and wishes that it were real. "Please," she says as tears slide over her nose and into her pillow. "Oh, please, please, _please_ …"

Her chest creaks and aches from her efforts not to sob openly, or wail like her still-screaming brother. She imagines that the ache runs even deeper than that, into her very soul that's been cloven down the middle into nearly two pieces. She wishes and wishes with every broken part of her that she has left.

She falls asleep clutching the book like a lifeline. Less than a month later, her wish comes true.

* * *

For the first time since she was small, Sarah has a party for her sixteenth birthday. She doesn't invite any of her friends from school, but the party is still as lively as that of any other teenager as more and more people phase through her vanity mirror and into her bedroom. She can't keep the smile off her face as they crowd around her bed, run underfoot, and throw confetti into the ceiling fan so it flies all over the room.

The Fireys trade stories and limbs in front of her bookshelf, laughing loudly enough to drown out the goblins who are perched next to the figurines her mom has sent over from England for the past three years. Mr. Worm (and the missus) sit on her desk, perched on a stack of books, and hold a long conversation with the Wiseman's hat while he snores lightly. Two chickens are roaming around on her carpet, and the goblins promise her they'll clean up after them before they leave.

Hoggle and Didymus and Ludo crowd around her where she sits on the bed and her smile is so wide that her cheeks hurt. Ludo looks longingly at the slice of cake on her plate and she hands it over without a word, thinking gleefully of what her stepmother would say if she knew that there was a troll with an affinity for rocks licking frosting off her dinner plates.

For the first time in what feels like ages, she's actually enjoying herself. Her laughter is among the loudest in the room and when she dances with Hoggle she doesn't feel like she's sixteen. She feels like she's a kid again, and for as determined as she's been to grow up this past year, it still feels amazing to just let go.

When the last guest leaves and magic has swept through her room, carrying confetti and streamers and black chicken feathers with it, it only takes a moment or so for the smile to fade from her face. Without all her friends the room feels empty and cavernous. All the life of her party is gone and now she just feels tired and worn out and hollow. There's something brittle inside her now and she's a bit afraid that if she isn't careful it will break. It _hurts_. It feels like they took away something she was sorely missing when they left.

Like there was something missing in the first place and she's only just now realized it's been gone.

She spies something that sparkles on the floor and gets closer to examine it, thinking it a bit of glitter the magical cleanup had missed. She draws back with a gasp, landing on her rear when she stumbles. Winking innocently at her in the light of her bedside lamp is a crystal bauble, exactly like the kind offered to her just under a year ago. Her breath is still coming in short pants as she stares at it, and for several long moments she doesn't move.

Then she reaches out and grasps it in her hand.

* * *

Sarah's seventeenth birthday comes and goes. Her parents mark the occasion silently, and Toby falls asleep on her empty, dusty bed. Irene sobs quietly when she finds him and at first attempts to remove him, but when he begins to cry as well she can't bear to make him leave.

He finds a little red book under Sarah's pillow later that night and sounds out the letters on the cover, illuminated by the bright moonlight streaming in through the window.

"The…. La-lab-ee-riii…rinth? Lab-a-rinth? Labyrinth! _The Labyrinth_!"

* * *

Sarah's eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth birthdays pass in much the same fashion. Her father and Irene hold a solemn vigil in the dining room, sipping coffee and not saying much. Her mother toasts to her daughter's memory with several glasses of red wine.

Toby falls asleep in her bed, clutching Lancelot with one hand and the _Labyrinth_ book in the other.

* * *

On Toby's seventh birthday, after his mother has sent him to bed and wished him a happy birthday for the very last time, he lays there and tries as hard as he can not to fall asleep. The house creaks around him, settling gently in the spring air. It's warm and cozy in his bed and he almost dozes off several times, but he pinches himself in order to stay awake and concentrates on the sound of muffled conversation downstairs.

Finally, after he hears his parents' bedroom door shut and he's counted silently to three hundred, he eases himself out from under the covers and creeps across the hall to Sarah's room.

It's largely untouched, as it has been for the past few years, and he absently trails his fingers along the spines of the fairy tale books on Sarah's shelf. He has the vaguest memory of being read to out of them, of Sarah's voice taking on different characters and her warmth behind his back as she held him in her lap. He climbs up on her bed and reaches under her pillow for the book.

It's not there.

Dismayed, he lifts up all the pillows at the head of the bed, hoping against hope that he hasn't somehow lost it. Did it fall behind the bed when he pushed it back into place last time? Oh, he hopes he hasn't lost it! Despite the fact that he doesn't ever remember seeing his sister with it, it feels like the last real piece of her he has left. He feels tears begin to well in his eyes as he makes to get off the bed, leaving the bedclothes in a wild disarray. How can he explain to Dad that he needs help getting the bed away from the wall so he can retrieve the book?

Just when he's about to give up all hope, his toe brushes something on the ground. He looks down and breathes an immense sigh of relief. It had just fallen under the bed! He must have knocked it off in his frantic movements. He gets down on the ground and lifts up the bed skirt, reaching for the book. Out of the corner of his eye he notices something sparkling. He turns.

It's a crystal ball, looking more thin and delicate than anything he's ever seen before, like a soap bubble turned to glass. It twinkles in the moonlight and for a moment he feels like there's something terribly, terribly familiar about it. He can't remember _what_ , but he knows that it _is_.

He hesitates a moment, and then reaches out to grasp it in his hand.


End file.
